DEATH ON THE L.I.R.R.: The Victims; 5 Everyday People, by Chance Or Ritual, Riding in Car No. 3

By PETER MARKS,

Published: December 9, 1993

MINEOLA, L.I., Dec. 8—
They wore the weary faces and rumpled suits of the end of the day: A father and son traveling home together from jobs at a Manhattan financial firm. A middle-aged man catching his usual train home to the daughter he adored. A young lawyer, newly admitted to the bar, on the last leg of a circuitous journey back to her house and husband.

Theirs were everyday faces from the most extraordinary of evening rushes, a cross-section of people who by chance or nightly ritual were sitting in a car on the Long Island Rail Road and were killed or seriously wounded in a few minutes of gunfire. And today, as word spread about who had not made it home, neighbors and relatives could do little more than rage and wail and remember.

The five who were fatally shot on the train ranged in age from 24 to 52. They were men and women, longtime commuters and recent additions to the ranks of daily rail riders, lifelong residents of Long Island and newcomers to the United States. They lived in apartments and modest, well-kept homes in the older suburbs of Nassau County that grew up along the railroad tracks, people on intimate terms with the trains.

"It's totally unfathomable," Thomas Cook said as he stood in a driveway in Mineola and spoke of his brother-in-law, Dennis McCarthy, a 52-year-old office manager with Prudential Securities who was one of the five who died in Car No. 3 of the 5:33 train to Hicksville. "It could have happened to anyone. You think of the random shootings in the city; you feel somewhat isolated out here. Now, you feel there are no borders."

Today the extended family gathered in Mr. McCarthy's house to console his wife, Carolyn, and to wait for news of their 26-year-old son, Kevin, who was shot in the head and critically wounded in the gunfire that killed his father. Kevin McCarthy recently started a job in the mutual funds section of one of Prudential's Manhattan offices, and it was the new custom of father and son to take the 5:33 home together.

"I knew they were on the train together," said Mr. Cook, a boilermaker who described Kevin's father as an effervescent man, a jokester par excellence who loved his family and skiing. "They had just gotten back from Killington last month," he said, referring to a popular ski area in Vermont. "He was a great guy, and he lived a great life."

They were the kinds of phrases repeated again and again about the victims on Car No. 3. It seemed to some, in fact, that the gunfire could not have been random at all, that it somehow had been directed at some of the best people in their lives.

"It's always the nice people," said Joe Richuitti, the superintendent of the cooperative apartment building in Mineola where James Gorycki, 51, had lived with his wife, Joyce, and daughter, Karen. The superintendent said a tenant this morning told him of the death of Mr. Gorycki, who recently had taken a job in the city that required him to commute by train. For many years before that, friends and family members said, he had worked as a salesman for a local stationery company.

What everyone remembers best about Mr. Gorycki was his complete devotion to his daughter, whose age was given as about 10 and with whom he could always be seen walking or playing or teaching to ride a bicycle. "He was a wonderful, wonderful person," said Barbara Giglio, a cousin. "All that Jimmy wanted to do was give a better life to his daughter and wife."

In Westbury, just east of Mineola, Myto Magtoto was trying to comprehend the death of his wife, Maria Theresa, a 30-year-old lawyer who had come to the United States only a year and a half ago from the Philippines, where they had been married. Friends said she was from a prominent Manila family; her father, Edgardo Tumangan, is secretary to the country's Senate. Having recently been admitted to the New York bar, Mrs. Magtoto was looking for a job, and had been interviewed on Monday by the office of the Suffolk County Attorney.

"She basically had everything going for her," her husband said, struggling to maintain his composure as he talked about his wife in front of the yellow Cape Cod house in which they rented an apartment. "I guess she was in the wrong place at the wrong time."

It was not usual for Mrs. Magtoto to be on the 5:33 from Hicksville, as the office in which she had been working temporarily was in Bay Shore, in Suffolk County. But because she could not get a ride on Tuesday to a station on her own rail line, she was forced to take a train from Bay Shore to Queens, and then switch in Jamaica to a train back to Westbury.

Carlos Garcia, the lawyer in Bay Shore who was helping Mrs. Magtoto in her search for full-time work, thought she had the makings of an outstanding legal career. An old friend of Mrs. Magtoto's father, he said that Mr. Tumangan had called him from Manila and was having difficulty believing his daughter was dead.

"Up to the last minute, he was hoping against hope that it wasn't her, that it was a case of mistaken identity," said Mr. Garcia, who traveled to the office of the Nassau County Medical Examiner today to assist Mr. Magtoto in identifying Mrs. Magtoto's body.

The families of Richard Nettleton, 24, of Roslyn Heights, and Mikyung Kim, 27, who authorities said they believed lived in New Hyde Park, declined to speak. In the community where Mr. Nettleton grew up, neighbors and friends described him as an excellent student who graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton.

"I've known them since they moved here a good 10 years ago," said Alice Mejias, who lives a few doors from the Nettletons on a cul-de-sac of about a dozen homes. "Richard was an honors student. He was a kid who did everything right."

Photos: Robert Guiliano, who suffered a chest wound, said that when the gunman approached, he thought, "That's it; I'm dead." He spoke at a news conference at North Shore University Hospital in Manhasset, L.I.; "It's totally unfathomable," Thomas Cook said as he stood in driveway yesterday in Mineola and spoke of his brother-in-law, Dennis McCarthy, a 52-year-old office manager with Prudential Securities, who was one of the five who died in Car No. 3 of the 5:33 Long Island Rail Road train to Hicksville. (Photographs by Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times) (pg. B9)